By the time you read this, I’m not even around. I’m at my friend Andrew’s house at Lake Anna. My normal routine consists of being alone on the internet, so once a year I like to live the opposite, hanging out with my eight closest friends and no internet at all.
I hope you can make a little time for yourself with the internet unplugged this weekend, too. Either way, here are some links to keep you entertained.
- The Crunchyroll CEO’s Reddit AMA sure left a lot of people unsatisfied, and Anime Viking was one. Crunchyroll has a lot of flaws, including its illegal beginnings and (for free users) spotty video flow. But I will always be in their court because they democratized anime streaming, making it so we can vote for the shows we love with our dollars.
- I have not forgotten about the reader survey, and I’m working on making some big changes to Otaku Journalist. I had a new photo taken for the sidebar, and I’m working on a custom theme from scratch with The Web Designer’s Guide to WordPress. My favorite new WordPress tool is a site that instantly tells you which theme a blog has installed: WhatWPThemeIsThat.com. Try it out on any WordPress site.
- The best part about having a blog? Inspiring other people to start their own blogs. Two reader blogs that started this week: Great Scott!, writing about his time in Japan, and heykagome, writing about otaku culture.
- I did NOT know WordPress wrote a free ebook full of 365 blog writing prompts. They’re general enough that it’d be easy to adapt them to your fandom blog.
- Dave writes about the dark side of convention volunteering—when you just can’t stop. Volunteering at conventions is a noble pursuit, but it’s not your full time job—or even a job!—so nobody is going to be upset if you don’t treat it like one.
- Anitwitter denizen @cptngarlock sparked an interesting discussion on r/TrueAnime about what it was like to be an anime fan in the ’00s. Reading through everyone’s experiences, I’m definitely feeling the nostalgia.
- I’ve written about how the mainstreamification of anime means we’re getting less of the “cheap and weird” stuff. But then I saw Lupin Without Commentary.
- Could Free! become MTV’s fandom of the year? Guess we’ll find out in a few days. I remember when MTV was the channel my cool older cousin watched. Now it’s just as geeky as me.
Photo by me. My Flickr page is mega outdated.